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Monday, August 17, 2009

It came to me when I happened to catch tonight's CBS Evening News (which I don't usually watch at all).

Want to know how to economically revitalize the newspaper and television news industries, and increase enlightenment among the general public in one fell swoop?

It's very simple: ban the words "conservative" and "liberal" from usage by professional journalists.

Those words are worse than useless. They are woefully outdated terminology. The only function of "liberalism" and "conservatism" is to excuse one's own intellectual laziness.

(And truth be known, I'm seeing a lot of laziness in CBS's reporting tonight... but not really more than one would expect from CNN or Fox News either.)

That's no doubt a big reason why television and print journalism is suffering a slow and lingering death. The alternatives on the Internet - which are not confining themselves to a paradigm that was faulty well before it was obsolete - are attracting a vast audience wanting and demanding a fresh look at things replete with new ideas. Dumbed-down "debate" along the conservative/liberal lines is horridly boring... and doesn't represent reality at all.

People are getting tired of fakery and illusion. There is a dire and growing hunger for truth that we haven't known very much in living memory. And if the traditional media has any desire at all to survive, it's left with no choice but to commit to the higher standard of ideas, and abandon adherence to the lowest common denominator of cheap ideologies.